After These Messages
by arandomshipper
Summary: Dipper inadvertently reveals his true feelings to Mabel, thinking she's asleep. The next day's fallout is...


**After These Messages**

Dipper was miserable.

In a life full of miserable moments, none had come close to preparing him for the misery he felt at this moment. Aided in part by the fact that he was just hours before on the highest high he had ever experienced, having the rug pulled from under him had landed him squarely in his lowest low to date. This was one screw up he had no idea how to fix. His life was well and truly ruined by one enormous error made in a moment of egregiously poor judgement. He paced outside his sister's room, searching in fervored desperation for the words that would turn back the clock, return things to normal. They didn't exist.

It all began the prior night. Well, it all really began quite a bit longer ago than that, but the important event had happened just yesterday evening.

He had finally fully and completely gotten over Wendy at age fifteen, upon realizing that there really wasn't room in his life for her or any other girl. No matter who he dated, be it the most perfect world famous billionaire bikini supermodel astrophysicist, she would always be second place in his heart to the one who had taken up residence there many years ago, dominating it with her irrepressible presence and redecorating the place to fit her eccentric tastes. That's right. His sister, Mabel. He had lived the last three years of his life with the knowledge that he had found his one true love, and it was his twin.

The great thing about being in love with your sister is that she definitely loves you back. Not everyone in the world gets to spend time every day with the love of their life, being each others' most important person. It's really a special thing.

The horrible thing about being in love with your sister is you can never, ever tell her, nor anyone else, for that matter. She simply can't find out that the love you feel for her is not brotherly at all, but romantic. Which means that you have to be on constant guard. Absolutely no slip-ups. Which brings us to last night.

It was a Friday night, and neither of them had a significant other. Dipper, of course, hadn't been looking for one for years already, and Mabel was between boyfriends at the moment, so they were hanging out on the couch watching movies late into the night, as they often did. And then...Mabel happened. Repeated unprovoked cuteness attacks, from which no defense is possible.

First, she drowsily slumped over, resting all her weight on Dipper, her head on his shoulder. Eek.

Then, she slumped down even further, burying her face into his stomach and clinging to his waist like a monkey as she drifted off. Eep.

Finally, when the movie was finished and he tried to shake her awake, saying, "Mabel, it's over. You need to get in your bed now," she used her most devastating attack of all. Tightening her hold on him, without opening her eyes, she said in a voice muddled by sleep, "Carry me."

There's absolutely no way he could say no to that, even though it was a very tall order. Sure, he had filled out a little since becoming a teenager, and sure, Mabel wasn't the largest eighteen-year-old girl around, but it wasn't like he spent his time lifting weights or something. Nevertheless, he made it happen, panting for breath and sweating up a storm when he finally lowered her as carefully as he could into her bed. And then...it happened.

He was so tired from the exertion that all he could do was collapse next to her unmoving for a few moments. And that was his undoing. The time spent staring at her sleeping face, combined with all her previous attacks of cuteness, wore away at his willpower. As his physical strength slowly returned, he found himself powerless to resist the impulse to lean forward and kiss her softly on the lips. He also couldn't resist taking this chance (she was sleeping anyway, right? she wouldn't hear him anyway) to, for once, tell her how he felt. As he pulled back, he whispered, "I am so in love with you, Mabel Pines."

And then, to his horror, she responded. She gave a little sleepy smile and mumbled something that sounded like, "A'lv y' too, D'per."

He ran from the room to his own in a total panic, unable to form a more coherent thought than ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap, where he threw himself into his own bed and hid under the covers like he was five again, breathing rapidly.

As he calmed down over time, his ability to think rationally returned to him, and he began analysis.

Possibility one: she was totally asleep and won't remember any of this when she wakes up. In that case, he's totally in the clear.

Possibility two: she was totally awake and lucid, and her positive response was an indication that his true feelings were actually returned. This possibility sent his hopes soaring to uncontrollable heights.

Possibility three: she was awake, but not lucid enough to realize what was actually happening and what it all meant, which caused her to give false positive responses, which would lead to two other possible results, one of which was terrifying to a degree that even Bill Cipher could never hope to achieve.

She might remember it all tomorrow just as muddled as she experienced it tonight, which would be the same result as possibility one. That would be fine.

Or she might remember everything in detail tomorrow, and with the lucidity of wakefullness understand everything that her sleepy mind had not, and be horrified at his confession, destroying their relationship and demolishing her opinion of him as person, forever branding him a disgusting pervert, in one fell swoop. That was the one thing he could not bear to happen, the entire reason he had been so meticulous in hiding his feelings for the past two years.

There was absolutely no chance Dipper was going to sleep that night. He pushed back the covers and stared sightlessly at the ceiling for hours, contemplating every possible scenario and calculating the probability of each. His mood soared as he considered the neutral and good scenarios and plummeted when he considered the bad ones. After repeatedly swinging back and forth like a pendulum, Dipper finally concluded that, given her relative clarity of speech and the fact that her words and actions only made sense as a reaction to his own, indicating definite knowledge of her surroundings, possibility number two was the strongest. Hope suffused his entire being like an electric charge, causing him to curl up into a fetal position and roll side to side, for how long he didn't know.

The arrival of morning brought with it a wave of exhaustion, as the emotionally draining activity of Dipper's night of pondering caught up with him. Deciding he needed some fuel, he got out of bed and wandered into the kitchen, where he retrieved a bowl and spoon, a carton of milk from the fridge, and some cheerios. He brought his loot into the dining room, sat at the table, and began eating slowly, zombie style, just barely awake.

He was vaguely aware of the sounds of someone moving through the kitchen, though it wasn't enough to break him from his stupor. What happened next was.

Mabel walked into the dining room, and the look on her face instantly answered the question of whether or not anything changed because of the prior night...and it wasn't the answer Dipper was hoping for. She looked at him with the most sorrowful, hurt look he had ever seen from her cutting him right to his core, and her words cut him even deeper. "Dipper. How could you?" She whispered tearfully, and fled the room.

Even though it was so silent you could hear a pin drop, Dipper could swear he heard the sound of his life crashing down around him. He couldn't even move for what seemed like hours, frozen in place with a spoon halfway to his open mouth in what would in other circumstances have been a comical pose. There was nothing funny about this, though. This was his worst nightmare come true.

Eventually, he shook himself from his shock and ran to the door of her bedroom, poised to knock...but then his brain caught up with him and asked him that dreaded question: then what? You knock, and then what? What do you do? What do you say? He had no answers, so he paced with frantic energy, as if the rapid movement of his body could somehow invoke more brain power, inventing some nonexistent solution on the spot.

He paced and paced, but the only things he was able to think up were more and more inventive and destructive self-recriminations. A solution might remain out of reach, but coming up with more ways to blame himself for the problem, that he could do.

But there is a limit to how much pain a person can put up with in the avoidance of future pain. One might endure a toothache for weeks to avoid the drill of the dentist, but live with that same toothache long enough and you'll find yourself punching yourself in the face to relieve the constant pain. The fear of the conversation and total lack of any kind of plan could not keep Dipper from his sister's door forever.

He knocked. "Mabel?"

"Mabel's not here right now! Go away!" came a muffled yell.

"Mabel, please. Can't we talk about this?"

"Talk about what? How my brother is an evil, sadistic jerk? Can I even call you my brother after what you did?"

"Isn't there any way we just forget this ever happened and go back to normal?"

"Oh, of course you would say that! You're the one who did it! I'm the one you did it to! Of course you want to forget it happened! Well, not this time, buster! I'm not usually one to hold grudges, but this is one time I am standing my ground!"

Dipper swollowed. "Please, Mabel. I'm sorry."

"You're _SORRY?!_ You really think this will all be okay just because you said you're sorry?! Dipper, there are some things you can't fix with an apology. It won't erase what you did. Nothing will!"

"I know that. I..." He wanted to apologize further, but just as she said, apologies were worthless for something like this. "I swear I'll never do it again."

"Or so you say, but you will. You will. You'll get complacent, and forget, and who will pay the price for it? Me, that's who!"

"No, Mabel! I won't! I won't! Please believe me, I'll do anything it takes!" He slumped down to a sitting position, his back to the wall facing her door. Tears filled his eyes. "Please. I'll never kiss you again. I'll never even touch you again. Please."

" _WHAT!?"_

Mabel's door burst open, and she stood seething in the doorway, glaring down at him with the angriest expression he'd ever seen from her. "You'll never kiss me again?! What was all that 'oh I'm so in love with you Mabel' stuff then?! I'm just a one-kiss stand to you? Well, if you think you can just grab your kiss and get out, you've got another think coming, mister! Let's see if you can keep saying all that junk after _THIS_!"

She jumped on top of him, and his brain completely turned off during the entirety of the intense makeout session that followed. Time became a distant memory. Any possible function for lips other than attaching firmly to his twin's was totally forgotten. Clothing became very, very ruffled, but none was removed due to the impossibility of achieving that while faces remained attached to each other.

Hours later, Dipper lay in the same position, in a state of utter contentment, with Mabel in the same state, laying on top of him, her head resting on his chest. His blissful state was interrupted by a niggling at the back of his head reminding him that there was indeed still an issue that had not been worked out.

"Mabel?" he said with trepidation, reluctant to disturb the perfection of the moment.

"Hmmm?" She asked with a sigh of happiness.

"If you weren't angry about me kissing you, what was all that even about?"

"Oh, yeah! I'm still mad at you!" she roared, and sprang off of him.

"But why?! What did I even do?!"

"You big fat jerk! You used up all the milk!"

 **Got milk?**


End file.
